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Narrowing Process and Finding the Gap
Throughout the first steps of my research process, my main goal was to focus on an area regarding animals, particularly marine life at SeaWorld. This was because I wanted to look at animal welfare and safety occurring within the park, especially after the release of the controversial documentary Blackfish. However after about a month of pursuing this topic, I realized that every aspect surrounding SeaWorld's controversy had been previously researched to an extent. I also realized that with my limited resources (time, funding, access) the logistics of conducting research on an amusement park in another state would make data collection extremely difficult.
Thus, I began focusing on animal conservation as a whole, and stumbled across the term 'charisma bias,' which I’d never heard of before. Essentially, this term encompasses the idea that people prefer animals that are physically more appealing, and tend to look past the scary, uglier-looking species.
Through further research I found that charisma bias popped up in studies on human populations, but had barely been analyzed in conservation films. Specifically, there was a lack of assessing charisma bias in said films. I realized that up to this point in time charisma bias had not been researched in depth in film portrayals, especially in wildlife conservation documentaries, and recognized this as my gap. This led me to develop my research question, which is: to what extent has the wildlife conservation docuseries Our Planet featured charisma bias?
Impactful Research
Several studies allowed me to deepen my understanding of charisma bias, and how it influences conservation efforts. One of the first sources that helped me realize the significance of charisma bias was the study 'The Twenty Most Charismatic Species' (Albert et al., 2018). This study provided a list of six different traits (open to one's interpretation, like 'cute') which were used to determine whether different species were 'charismatic' or not. Albert et al.'s work allowed me to realize the wide scale impact charisma bias has on humans across the globe, and how many people are susceptible to this bias. Furthermore, it made me wonder what physical, specific traits correlate to an animal's charisma. This led me to the discovery of another key source, which was Jarić et al.'s (2020) study of 'The Role of Species Charisma in Biological Invasions.' This was the first source that backed up a majority of the charismatic traits I was planning to use in my methods, with a previous study that supported why each trait is 'charismatic.' The main advantage this source gave me was determining my methods (discussed below), as I needed previous studies to defend how I was going to conduct my research without bias.
Methodology
When figuring out how I wanted to conduct my research, I quickly realized the major obstacle of researcher bias. Despite the fact that charisma bias can be seen throughout previous research, there was no list of specific (physical) traits that correlate with charisma from one source alone. Rather, many of my sources based these traits off of one's own perception, like whether an animal is 'cute' or not. Thus, I needed to create a scale of my own based on previous research; the goal being I could then determine whether a species is charismatic or not, unbiasedly, based on facts about the animal rather than perception. There had also been limited research done on wildlife documentaries in particular, so I wanted to account for that as well. My methods included:
Watching Our Planet and Our Planet II, which feature a range of habitats and species, and therefore allowed me to look at a vast amount of ecosystems in the given time period I had to conduct research
For each animal, I marked them down for either having a charismatic attribute for a trait (+1) or uncharismatic attribute (-1) which was then put on to a scale to compare each species' charisma as a whole. Depending on if the final number was positive (charismatic) or negative (uncharismatic), this distinguished each species' charisma. The traits I assessed for each species is featured below
I also recorded how long each species was talked about in the documentary, what ecosystem they're featured in, and (based on the IUCN Red List) what level of endangerment the species is classified as- this allowed me to cross compare the charisma status of each animal to whether the documentary is featuring charismatic animals either a) in a particular ecosystem, b) that are more or less endangered, or c) featuring charismatic species more than uncharismatic species
I put my results for each category onto an excel spreadsheet, which is divided based on each episode for easier separation between each species
The Importance of this Research
As we are currently in our 6th mass extinction, all species are at a higher risk of becoming endangered, and ultimately extinct. It’s important to note that the main cause of this extinction is human-made. This includes, but is not limited to, un-sustainability and climate change; and is predicted to eliminate species between 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than a ‘normal’ elimination rate (World Wildlife Fund, 2022). Specifically, species that are viewed as ‘uncharismatic’ are important to address, as their lack of knowledge publicly commonly contributes to their endangered status (Xing, 2024). Additionally, conservation biology, the study of conserving biodiversity, tends to disregard lesser known species. Therefore, as more species become endangered, there’s a need for researchers to look at the overlooked species, before they go extinct forever (Dubois, 2003).
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